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Florida Voting: Like ‘a Third-World Country’

Alan Diaz/Associated PressSouth Floridians stand in line to vote on Saturday, in Miami.

With one day left in the campaign, a basic difference between the two parties is in depressing evidence: Democrats seek to expand the franchise, while Republicans seek to restrict it.

A Times editorial over the weekend described recent Republican efforts to confuse, mislead or intimidate voters, hamper early voting, and otherwise reduce turnout among minorities, poor people and other likely Democrats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, Iowa and Florida. The situation in that last state is particularly egregious.
Some South Florida voters waited as long as seven hours to cast a ballot on Saturday. The Miami Herald reported that, in Miami-Dade, the last voter wasn’t checked in until 1 a.m. An untold number of people left the queues without voting at all.

In response, the Florida Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit to extend early voting hours in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties, which together account for about 32 percent of the state’s registered Democrats. The lawsuit stated that the three counties have “inadequate polling facilities” and that “long lines and extreme delays unduly and unjustifiably burdened the right to vote.”

According to a Times story, election supervisors in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach “said they would allow voters to request and cast absentee ballots on Sunday,” but later that day “Miami-Dade’s county election supervisor closed down the line for absentee ballots after two hours.” (It was eventually reopened.)

On MSNBC today, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, criticized the situation in Florida: “I don’t know what went on in Florida, but I do have to say that in this day and age, it’s inexcusable that in this country, we have anything like this going on. I’ve led delegations around the world to watch voting and this is the kind of thing you expect in a third-world country, not in the United States of America.”

Ms. Whitman declined to blame these third-world conditions on “a big Republican plot,” but Florida’s long lines were not unavoidable. They were not the result of some non-partisan act of nature. It’s possible to trace the delays back to Republican Governor Rick Scott’s decision to reduce the number of early-voting days from 14 to eight. Note that he shrank the window after 2008, when Democrats held a significant early-voting advantage.

Mr. Scott had several opportunities to prevent this weekend’s fiasco. On Thursday, in response to long lines and record turnouts statewide, the Florida Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters asked Mr. Scott to extend weekend early-voting hours preemptively. But he refused. The Times reported that “the governor and state election officials turned down the request, saying that the process was running smoothly.”